An ugly truth made abundantly clear by the economic crisis is that certain public employee unions do not represent the values so excitingly exhibited by the swashbuckling Three Musketeers – “all for one and one for all.”

New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang, who plans to cut 38 jobs each from the police and fire departments, offered to save the jobs if the unions would take a 10 percent pay cut. None of the unions did: Stab the guy who watches your back - in his back.

Instead, the unions made a transparent show of faux-solidarity by converging on the city to protest the cuts and mimic those absolutely annoying threats of Armageddon used by the Bush Administration to fritter away the common wealth.

Bring the situation closer to home. What if Town Manager John Klimm, being painted into a financial corner like all other local leaders, is forced to offer local police the same deal; no layoffs for a 10 percent pay cut, a nice and neat quid pro quo in a time of crisis that ought to please everyone considering the alternatives.

Get yourself a copy of the town’s pay list that shows the income of every municipal employee – firefighters excepted – and you’ll see the income of some patrolmen exceeding that of the police chief, assorted municipal department heads and the town manager himself.

“The new elite,” is what the owner of a local home remodeling company labels these first responders who have been the recipients of a public largesse much like the spending habits of a drunken sailor on liberty.

The remodeling company owner is a bit bent by this because he is aware that some municipal employees also run their own quiet small businesses, taking jobs away from remodelers and other craftsmen who need that work to earn their share of dwindling consumer spending just to stay afloat.

He sees this as doubly unfair because these first responders, regardless of what town they work in, can cut prices because their insurance and vacations are provided by the government that employs them.

And more than one teacher has added income from a second career, such as working the boat lines in the summer, tending bar, even owning restaurants and extracting decent public pensions while they are at it.

Maybe that’s the American Way in good times, but when the country’s fortunes adjust, everything is transformed. Government employees cannot be considered exempt from hard times.

The daughter-in-law who works for a bank consulting firm in New York City tells us of the wholesale layoffs in the besieged banking industry, one in which just about every employee now worries constantly about the future of their employment.

In most private-industry cases, the luxury of choosing pay cuts over job losses doesn’t exist. In fact, both strategies are employed simultaneously; that is, some people lose their job, some others take pay cuts…or can join the ranks of the unemployed.

Our misfortune is that we live in a country of great expectations, guarantees and entitlements. Nowhere is that more apparent than in government employment, where, history has it, jobs are supposedly more secure than the private sector. But that was only true when public employees earned considerably less than those in the private sector.

Now the situation is reversed, particularly in service sector economies like the Cape’s. Look at the earnings of many policemen in this town and you’d think they are all department heads, an upside-down situation where Indians earn more than the chiefs.

When it comes to firefighters, one wonders what effect fire district exemptions from Prop. 2 ½ will have in these difficult days. Unfettered by budgetary constraints set by Prop 2 ½, will fire district taxes, backed by stacked district meetings, simply increase to continue pay raises and support job security?

It’s a very sad thing to see a family man and/or woman lose their job and, perhaps, their home to unemployment. Taxpayers are willing to sacrifice to a degree to avoid job losses of municipal employees.

But those same employees need to do their part by seriously considering contracted “temporary” pay cuts or freezes when and where necessary to save jobs in the knowledge that there are hundreds of people lined up who would gladly replace them for less money.

Service industry workers surely marvel at why a policeman earning $100,000 cannot temporarily live on $90,000 to save a colleague’s job.